The following is a series of emails, with intimate details redacted, from a filmmaker intent on my reviewing his new film:
The following is an open letter to (un)said filmmaker, and hopefully all like him:
Tuesday 17 December 2013
Saturday 30 November 2013
Same-sex unions: the real question is 'what are you talking about?'
Being that this blog exists primarily solely to catalogue my writing, I feel justified in posting this comment retort to an appallingly ignorant Cork Independent opinion piece which, at an eventual and unintentional 600+ words, is significant enough to warrant preservation.
Theologist Anna Shephard is campaigning for a no vote in the 2015 referendum on same sex marriage. A recent article in the Cork Independent presents her case for what I call “a momentous step towards true inanity”.
Theologist Anna Shephard is campaigning for a no vote in the 2015 referendum on same sex marriage. A recent article in the Cork Independent presents her case for what I call “a momentous step towards true inanity”.
Thursday 22 August 2013
Equal Opportunities? Not Specified
“Not specified” was the drop-down option I reluctantly
selected under the “religion” section as I completed the online registration
page for the National University of Ireland, Galway. It’s rather a personal
piece of information to ask, so the possibility of non-disclosure is a welcome
one. What’s not so welcome is the lack of a “no religion” option: I want to specify, I’d like my personal
details to fully reflect who I am—an atheist, among other things—rather than
suggesting faith is a topic on which my lips are sealed. It’s not some militant
mindset that leads me to complain: I’ve lived happily and quietly without
religion for maybe a decade now, and never felt the urge to run about trying to
convert the faithful. Few subjects interest me as little as religion, so why
not simply not specify with a shrug of the shoulders?
Sunday 18 August 2013
Locarno 2013
A collection of content from the 66th Festival del Film Locarno.
Next Projection
—Review: The Dirties
—Review: Exhibition
—Review: Wrong Cops
—Review: Our Sunhi
—Review: The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears
—Review: Distant
—Review: Short Term 12
—Review: Real
—Douglas Trumbull masterclass report
—Locarno Dispatch 1: 2 Guns; The Dirties; Christopher Lee; What Now? Remind Me; By the River; The Human Variable; Wrong Cops.
—Locarno Dispatch 2: Exhibition; Gare du Nord; Our Sunhi; When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism; Pays Barbare; Short Term 12; Gabrielle.
—Locarno Dispatch 3: Story of My Death; Human Geography; The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears; The Stone; Sangue; Douglas Trumbull; Distant; Coast of Death.
—Locarno Dispatch 4: Real; If I Were a Thief... I'd Steal; "Dare to Be Weird"; "Why Film Critics Still Matter"; Roxanne; The Special Need; The Green Years; Abel Ferrara; 2001: A Space Odyssey; It Should Happen to You; Mouton.
Indiewire
—"Corneliu's Comic Catharsis: 'When Evening Falls on Bucharest' Looks Back With Laughter"
—"Blurred Lines: Claire Simon's 'Gare du Nord' and 'Human Geography' Challenge the Boundaries Between Fiction and Doc"
FilmLinc
—"We Had a Good Run: The Festival Fete for Paulo Rocha"
—"Egoism and Eternity in What Now? Remind Me and The Dirties"
Film Ireland
—Report: Locarno Film Festival
Pardo Live
—Short Term 12 press conference report
FRED Film Radio
—Interview: Nontawat Nombenchapol, By the River
Tuesday 30 July 2013
On the Road Again: Kelly Reichardt and the New American Road Movie
Unlike,
for instance, comedy or drama, both rooted primarily in inherent faculties of
human emotion and empathy, certain cinematic genres find themselves and their
life spans distinctly linked to specific cultural and historical contexts. Film
noir is the classic example, its immediate life—from the early 1940s to the
late 1950s—short enough to warrant the protracted argument that continues to
this day as to whether it can indeed be classified a genre at all. Inextricably
linked to the social circumstances of the United States in the period
immediately following the Second World War, noir’s dominant themes and tropes,
though still reworked now in films categorised as neo-noir, address issues
particular to that place in that period of time. The western, too, though still
more recognisably intact in its classical form than noir, would seem to offer
little explicit relevance to modern America, its frontier narratives now
outdated by more than a century. The road movie, then, is a particularly
interesting case: arguably growing only more relevant with the passage of time
and the ever-increasing ubiquity of infrastructure, the genre has nonetheless
encountered ebbs and flows through the course of its lifetime that suggest an
important link between social circumstances and the road’s cinematic
exploration thereof. In briefly examining these resurgences and assessing the predominant
narrative and stylistic tropes that characterise the genre, this essay aims to
examine the films of director Kelly Reichardt in the context of modern America,
and through them to posit the emergence of a new breed of road movie that
speaks to the issues facing the nation today.
24 Lies per Second: Illusionism and the Excess of Reality in the Films of Michael Haneke
“Film
is 24 lies per second at the service of truth”
—Michael Haneke (24 Realities per Second)
Such
a play on Jean-Luc Godard’s famous dictum as to the inherent truth of the
cinematic medium is typical of the cynical postmodernism of Michael Haneke, the
Austrian writer-director whose feature films have consistently engaged in
revealing and reassessing what he sees as the inevitable falsity of the filmed
image. Considered a realist by virtue of his often long takes, predominantly
naturalistic dialogue, and anti-sensationalist presentation of violence and
sexuality, Haneke’s work has in fact constantly pointed toward its own unreality, exposing the abstraction of
the cinematic image and the long tradition of the mechanical reproduction of
reality as, necessarily, a manipulation of truth and thereby of the spectator.
In eleven theatrical releases to date, he has repeatedly drawn attention to the
extent of this manipulation, using his films as incitements to his audiences to
re-evaluate their own relationship to reality and question the degree to which
modern media—television and the internet as much as film—has divorced them from
a meaningful connection to the truth of the world in which they exist. This
essay intends to assess Haneke’s subjugation of the cinematic apparatus to his
own self-reflexive end, and to reach—through an investigation of the manner in
which he implements and inverts typical tropes of screen realism—an
understanding of the key themes his oeuvre addresses by way of this intently
self-aware, postmodern deconstruction of filmic reality.
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